A bridge in Minnesota collapsed yesterday, falling about sixty feet into the Mississippi River with traffic on it. Apparently some structural problems have been known for a few years, but they weren’t surmised to be bad enough to make the bridge fall. At least four people were killed.
The water below it was about seven or eight feet as I recall reading. I know how very unlikely it is, but I’ve since imagined crossing the Cape Fear River downtown or the Intracoastal Waterway going to Wrightsville Beach. The drop would be scary enough with either of those, but the Cape Fear has such a strong current and they both are so deep.
Last night I finished playing around with a Photoshop painting project of mine. I think it’s my best yet, mainly due to the background texture painting I did. It was also the quickest.
Work was good today. Well, I kept the support desk empty as much as I could and I followed up with a lot of sales tickets and closed out a bunch of old ones. After that I stopped by the bank then went to the Cingular/AT&T store to talk to them about phones.
Yesterday I’d called Amanda and told her excitedly that I was getting a Blackberry. Today I called and and told her in a downcast tone that I might not be getting a Blackberry. She asked why not and I told her that I might get an iPhone instead!
Here’s the deal, the pros and the cons and how it all went down. If my boss, Scott Hendrix, decided to keep my phone on Suncom, we’d be looking at paying about $85 for unlimited minutes and a data plan for a Blackberry. With Cingular/AT&T we’d be looking at getting a family plan and he’d be splitting the minutes between himself, me, and his wife, Anne Marie. That would be $150 for 3000 minutes or $200 for 4000 minutes. Of course, they offer free calling to other Cingular phones, so calls between us and to Amanda would be free at least. On top of that you have to add $20 for his iPhone data plan and $40 for a data plan for a Blackberry phone or one with Windows Mobile on it, or another $20 if I were to get an iPhone. So overall, it’s actually $20 cheaper for me to get an iPhone.
So, the phones themselves. With the Blackberry I wasn’t able to log into our ticketing system for some reason. I couldn’t do it on the one in the store and I couldn’t do it on Adam’s Blackberry last night when I tried. The browser’s not very pretty either- it’s got a lot of text and the page is smooshed together. On the Windows Mobile phone, the browser looked a little better and I was able to log into the ticketing system. With the iPhone you get a full Safari browser with tabs and everything. On top of that you can check your voicemail is itemized so you can check it in any order, save it and delete it. Just those two features alone I think make it best suited for me.
So here’s what’s in the way. Scott and Tim want to start making sure the sites we build are friendly to mobile devices. To be able to test them out, we’d need the three main platforms represented. Tim’s got a Windows Mobile phone, Scott’s got an iPhone, so I’d need to have a Blackberry. Being a beggar and not a chooser, I’ll take whatever I’m given, but I really do think the iPhone would suit me best. I could possibly put off buying a laptop if I got that too.
Speaking of laptops, since this weekend is tax-free weekend, I stopped by Best Buy and Circuit City to take a glance at some of them. I’d like to get a Mac, but we really can’t afford one right now. Failing that, my options are to either get a pretty nice Windows laptop and use that or get an inexpensive laptop to hold me over and hope it does a good enough job. While at Circuit City I picked up a copy of the movie 300.
After work we were supposed to have small group, as we do every Thursday. However, Elliot Clark was going to be out of town for work, so he and Melissa Nicholson weren’t going to come. Rob Peterson called and said some friends were having a wedding thing, and I assume they sprung it on them rather suddenly for two reasons. The first was that Rob apologized for it being such late notice and the second was that Kristen Barriner, in the background, piped up that she had gotten the plastic bowls she was going to bring tonight.
Since half the group wasn’t coming I called Kyle Van Zandt to see if they still wanted to get together. We ended up going to his and Lorin’s place for dinner (which she was fixing this week) and watching 300.
On the news front for them, they both got jobs in the last week. Kyle already had a job at the Port City Java at Shipyard and Independence, but it was just to hold him over. He got hired as a teacher at a very new Christian Academy, which is great because he was going to go back to school to get a master’s degree if he didn’t get a job. Lorin, who studied education at Carolina, got a job at a school too, which she just found out today. It’s so awesome that tings worked out for them like that. They felt called to move down here to Wilmington and they had pretty much no concrete plans before moving.
300. That’s the kind of movie that makes you want to be a man’s man. Drink some beer, smash some bad guys, have manly sex with your tough-as-nails wife and stand up for what’s right. Amanda even liked it. She didn’t think it was great, but she liked it.
Zach Dotsey
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